During the operation of a network, implementing Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) of a host accessing the network is an important part of user management. On the one hand, a network operator needs to authorize different hosts accessing the network to allow them to access corresponding services, and then charges different hosts for different services. On the other hand, the charging rates for the same host for the same service at different time may be different. In order to implement the above charging, the network operator is required to be able to acquire the various accounting data of the hosts accessing the network.
Since in the operable and manageable network, the authorization and charging of the host directly influences operator's income and user's benefit, a reasonable accounting policy is necessary for the operator, without which both the operator's and user's benefit can not be guaranteed.
In the IPv4 network, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has defined related RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial in User Service) protocols such as RFC2865, RFC 2866 (RFC, Request for Comments) and the like to ensure a unified charging of the host. Although in an IPv6 network, IETF defines RFC2865, RFC2866 and RFC3162 to describe the procedure of authenticating and charging the IPv6 and IPv4 hosts, the authentication and accounting techniques based on users also develop constantly along with the continuous development of the IPv6 network.
In the IPv6 network, one or multiple unicast addresses (a unicast address is used for unicast transmission, and during the unicast transmission, data transmission path from a source host to each destination host are established independently) may be allocated for a host. Considering practical requirements of the network operator, it is needed to provide different authorizations to different addresses allocated for the host and adopt different accounting policies in an RDIUS server, a DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) server or other servers. For instance, when a host accesses different services by different IP addresses of the host, the host may be charged for the different services according to different charging rates.
However, at present, there is not a method for respectively authorizing and respectively charging different IP addresses of the same host, even in RFC3162.